A GARDEN IN A DESERT
HIS dwelling leaped into sight as Hardin turned the corner of the
street. There was but one street running through the twin towns,
flanked by the ditches of running water. The rest were ditches of
running water edged by foot-paths. Scowling, he passed under the
overhanging bird-cages of the Desert Hotel without a greeting for the
loungers, whose chairs were drawn up against the shade of the brick
walls. His abstraction aborted the hallo of jovial Ben Petrie, who
was leaving his bank for his vineyard, the more congenial half of his
two-sided life. Petrie stood for a minute on the narrow board-walk
watching the hunched shoulders, the angry blind progress. He shrugged.
Hardin was sore. It _was_ pretty tough. Such infernal luck! He got
thoughtfully into his English trap.
Fred Eggers left his motley counter, and joined the group of lounging
Indians outside his store. He had a morning paper in his hand. His pale
blue eyes looked surprised as Hardin’s momentum swept him past. “Mr.
Hardin,” he called ineffectually.
The momentum slackened as Hardin neared the place he called his home.
An inner tenderness diluted the sneer that disfigured his face. He
could see Innes as she moved around in the little fenced-in strip that
surrounded her desert tent. She insisted on calling it a garden, in
spite of his raillery.
“Gerty’s in bed, I suppose,” thought Tom. He had a sudden vivid picture
of her accusing martyrdom. His mouth hardened again. Innes, stooping
over a rose, passed out of his vision.
It came to Hardin suddenly that a man has made a circle of failure when
he dreads going to his office and shrinks from the reproaches at home.
“A ‘has-been’ at forty!” he mused. Where were all his ships drifting?
Innes, straightening, waved a gay hand.
“She’s raising a goodly crop of barrels.” His thought mocked and
caressed her. Her garden devotion was a tender joke with him. He loved
the Hardin trait in her, the persistence which will not be daunted. An
occupation with a Hardin was a dedication. He would not acknowledge the
Innes blood in her. Like that fancy mother of hers? Innes was a Hardin
through and through!
“It’s in the blood,” ran his thought. “She can’t help it. All the
Hardins work that way. The Hardins always make fools of themselves!”
Innes, lifting her eyes from a crippled rose, saw that the black devils
were consuming him again.
“Will you look at this wreck!” she cried.
The wind-storm the previous week had made a sickening devastation
of her labors. The morning-glories alone were scatheless. A pink
oleander drooped many broken branches from which miracles of perfect
flowers were unfolding. The prettiest blossom to Hardin was the
gardener herself. She was vivid from eager toil. Hardin looked at her
approbatively. He liked her khaki suit, simple as a uniform, with
its flowing black tie and leather belt. She looked more like herself
to-day. She had bleached out, in Tucson. She had been letting herself
get too tanned, running around without hats. Sunburn paled the value
of those splendid yellow eyes of hers. He could always tease her by
likening them to topazes.
“Cat’s eyes, why don’t you say it?”
She pushed a teasing lock of hair out of her eyes with one of her
mud-splashed garden gloves. It left a ludicrous smudge across her cheek.
“Each time I leave this garden,” she complained, “I declare I won’t
again. Not even for the Marshalls.” She bent over again to adjust a
bottomless keg around a wind-whipped, moribund plant.
“Quite a keg plant!” he quizzed. “Raising anything else?”
“And the glory of the morning he does not see!” she exclaimed with
theatric intent.
His eyes ran over the pink and purple lines of cord-trained vines
which made floral screens for her tent. Free of the strings overhead,
they rioted over the ramada, the second roof, of living boughs. He
acknowledged their beauty. They gave grace to bare necessity; they
denied the panting, thirsty desert just beyond.
He remembered his own ramada. Gerty had hated it, had complained of it
so bitterly when she came home from New York that he had had it pulled
down and replaced by a V roof of pine boards, glaring and ugly. Gerty
was satisfied, for it was clean; she no longer felt that she lived in a
squaw-house. Let the Indians have ramadas; there was no earthly reason
she should. He had urged that the desert dwellers had valuable hints
to give them. But what was a ramada to him, or anything else?
He nodded at Innes.
“They are doing so much better than the ones you planted at the office.
I wonder if Sam doesn’t water them enough?” His mood was faultfinding.
“Didn’t he water your roses while you were gone?”
“Oh, he _waters_ enough,” smiled his sister. “But Sam’s not for
progress. He won’t see the difference between watering and irrigating.”
“It looks like a train wreck, or a whipped prize-fighter, next day,”
observed Hardin.
“It’s really my fault. I staked it.” She was still mourning over her
calamity. “I forgot to barrel it. Stakes won’t do here. The keg’s the
thing.”
“That’s what they think in Mexicali.” Hardin turned to leave.
“The joke’s as stale as their beer,” retorted Innes. She did not want
him to go so soon. She pointed out a new vine to him. She had brought
it from Tucson; “Kudzu,” they called it; a Japanese vine. And there was
another broken rose, quite beyond the help of stripped handkerchiefs
and mesquit splints.
He followed her around the tent, her prattle falling from his grim
mood. He was not thinking of her flowers except as a mocking parallel.
The desert storm had made a havoc of his garden--a sorry botch of his
life. He and Innes had been trying to make a garden out of a desert;
the desert had flouted them. It was not his fault. Something had
happened; something quite beyond his power. Luck was turning against
him.
Innes, why, she was playing as with a toy. It was the natural instinct
of a woman to make things pretty around her. But he had sacrificed
his youth, his chances. His domestic life, too--he should never have
carried a dainty little woman like Gerty into the desert. He had never
reproached her for leaving him, even last time when he thought it
was for good. The word burned his wound. Whose good? His or Gerty’s?
Somehow, though they wrangled, he always knew it would turn out all
right; life would run smoothly when they left the desert. But things
were getting worse; his mouth puckered over some recollections. Yet he
loved Gerty; he couldn’t picture life without her. He decided that it
was because there had never been any one else. Most fellows had had
sweethearts before they married; he had not, nor a mistress when she
left him, though God knows, it would have been easy enough. His mouth
fell into sardonic lines. Those half-breed women! No one, even when a
divorce had hung over him. Oh, he knew what their friends made of each
of Gerty’s lengthened flights; he knew! But that had been spared him,
that vulgar grisly spectacle of modern life when two people who have
been lovers drag the carcass of their love over the grimy floor of a
curious gaping court. He shuddered. Gerty loved him. Else, why had
she come back to him? Why had she not kept her threat when he refused
to abandon his desert project and turn his abilities into a more
profitable dedication? He could see her face as she stared flushing up
into his that nipping cold day when he had run into her on Broadway.
He remembered her coquetry when she suggested that there was plenty of
room in her apartment! His wife! She spoke of seeing his pictures in
the papers. “He had grown to be a great man!”
That piquant meeting, the week following had been the brightest of his
life. He was sure then that Gerty loved him. The wrangles were only
their different ways of looking at things. Of course, they loved each
other. But Gerty couldn’t stand pioneer life. She had loved him, or
she would not so easily have been persuaded to try it over again. She
yearned to make him comfortable, she said. So she had gone back, and
pulled down his ramada, and put his clothes in the lowest bureau drawer!
“It wasn’t either of our faults,” he ruminated. “It was the fault of
the institution. Marriage itself is a failure. Look at the papers, the
divorce courts. A man’s interests are no longer his wife’s. Curious
that it should be so. But it’s a fact. It is the modern discontent.
Women want different careers from their husbands.”
Yet, how could he help throwing his life into his work? He had
committed himself; it was an obligation. Besides, he was a Hardin;
they take things that way. And, too, a man can not live in the desert
the best years, the vivid years of his life without absorbing its
grim indomitable spirit; without learning to love, to require the
great silent mornings, the vast star-brilliance of the nights; without
falling under the spell of the land, the spell of elusiveness and
mystery, of false distances, illusions; of content.
If it were not for that indefinable something, his allegiance to the
cause which mocked at reasons and definitions; oh, he knew!--he had
tilted with Gerty and been worsted!--he would have resigned from the
company, his company which had dishonored him. Why should he stay to
get more stabs, more wounds? MacLean, what in God’s name had MacLean
ever done for the valley? And Rickard? It was he, Tom Hardin, who had
pulled the valley, and therefore the company, from ruin, and it was
that very act which had ruined him. Yet for his life, were he to go
over it again, he knew he could not do differently. A curious twist
of the ropes which had pulled the company back from the edge of the
precipice and mangled him. Where was the loyalty of his associates?
Loyalty, there was no such thing! They were cowards, all of them.
Afraid of the power of the O. P. Truckling to it! Kotowing to Marshall,
shivering every time he opened those profane lips of his. Bah! It made
his stomach turn. Oh, he saw through their reason for kicking him out.
He hadn’t been born yesterday. This was a big thing, too big not to
rouse cupidity, cupidity of men and corporations. He had been fooled
by Marshall’s indifference; play, every bit of it; theatric. Faraday’s
reluctance? Sickening. It was a plot. Some one had put him up to it,
given him the first suggestion, made him think it was his own. Hot
chestnuts, all right! He was burned all right, all right! And the last
scorch, this pet of Marshall’s! Hardin gave a scantling in his path a
vicious kick.
The girl’s prattle had died. She walked with him silently.
At the door of her tent, she stopped, looking at him wistfully. She
wished he could hide his hurt. If he had only some of the Innes’ pride!
“How are things?” She used their fond little formula.
“Oh, rotten!” growled Hardin, flinging away. The gate slammed behind
him.